


Nightingale's Girls

by Zoya1416



Category: Rivers of London
Genre: Attempted Extortion, Gen, Madame Teng - Freeform, Taoist Sorcery, The River Fleet, Unauthorized Magic, Unexpected family, magical injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-09-13 08:13:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9114550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoya1416/pseuds/Zoya1416
Summary: A teenage girl shows up in the Folly making extraordinary claims about Nightingale.





	1. Kismet

The barking sent me hurrying up the main staircase. There was no reason for Toby to be barking—Molly was the only one upstairs. Nightingale had gone out on an errand of his own. We were at a stable point just now—no new Falcon cases, no calls from Detective Sergeants hoping that they could unload their case on us. Even though we'd explained it several times, unknown and possibly magical words did not mean magical activity. Especially when the symbols and writing came from Lord of the Rings. I had considered working up a Power Point demonstration for Hendon describing the difference, but then I'd have to persuade Hendon to let the general police know about the Folly. The Powers That Be would choke on this. Better to let the magical cops remain in secret until they had to be summoned. Possibly by rituals and spells, who knew?

All they had to do was lift the phone and ask us. I was a little annoyed today—no one came pounding on our doors. And why would anyone be able to get in through our forcefields, aka magical protections as Nightingale insisted?

I was particularly annoyed by this interruption, because I'd been on my way to the firing range. I'd just finished my first session with Greek, three hours, and wanted to smack some fireballs into targets. It should have made me suspicious yesterday when Nightingale praised my progress with Latin. He rarely praised anything. I was pretty pleased with myself, since I'd finally—finally! untangled the cases and was rapidly building up my vocabulary. Then, today, he handed me Homer, and buggered off on an unknown errand, the bastard. It was possibly to eat an early curry in secret—still not a good idea for either of us to skip Molly's dinners too often, because it irritated her, and you never knew what she'd revert to. Or it could have been just to get out of the Folly so I couldn't ask him any questions.

I had to chase down a Greek dictionary, and also found two translations in the mundane library. Did you know that Homer has been in constant print for the last 3000 years? I learned that in 10 seconds on Wikipedia. It did not improve my happiness at all. As I said, I was on the way to the firing range for some very much needed relief, when this erupted.

In the main lobby a white girl in her mid teens was squaring off with Molly. 

Beverley would be able to name all the styles, but she had on ankle length tan girlfriend chinos, I could recognize that. A knit sweater of some kind, a Burberry checked jacket too short, and trackers. This was not improved by several ropes of gold necklaces, with large hoop earrings, nor by her high ponytail. She was unaccountably missing her baseball cap. I thought she was striving for a certain look, but she might have been just modeling the 2017 Chanel runway fashions for all I knew. Bev had shown me the ridiculous pictures.

She scowled and bellowed.

“I do have a right to see him. I do! I fucking don't have to talk to the help, either. Go get him now!”

Molly hissed at her and showed her sharp teeth. This usually gets quite a reaction, and most people shut up, but obviously the girl had seen plenty of Japanese horror movies. She shrugged off Molly's appearance.

I usually try to de-escalate a stand-off, but I was rattled. Who was this stroppy girl, and more importantly, how had she gotten in?

“Miss! Can I help you with something?”

She turned to me, a sneer already on her face. “I said, I don't want to talk to the help. I want to talk to the Nightingale, and I have every right to do so.”

“And what is your name and address, please?” I used my command voice, but she wasn't having any of it.

“You can call me Kismet.” 

I winced. I hate people who try to wind me up. 

“That's great, Kismet. So what's all this then?” You have to.

“My grandmother needs help. And I need to see the old bastard.”

It was then that I noticed someone behind her, a woman in a wheelchair, legs covered with a blanket. She was about mid 80's, I thought. Unless illness had made her look much older. She raised her head, and I was shocked. Her faced was pulled down on one side, drooping—it could be a simple stroke, but it was also a classic sign of thaumaturgical degradation due to overuse of magic.

“Your—grandmother?” An unwelcome idea began to surface.

'Kismet' smiled triumphantly. “Yes, my grandmother—and his granddaughter.”

There were many questions I wanted to ask, but the first thing was hospitality. I got them settled in the breakfast room, and had Molly bring in tea. The girl patiently broke a biscuit in half, and held it for her grandmother to grasp with a weak hand. I realized that I'd forgotten my manners, even if they weren't aware of the tradition. 

“Go ahead, eat and drink freely without obligation.”

Kismet raised her head, startled. “I thought that was only in—fairy tales”— her voice drifted off.

“Welcome to the Folly.” I smirked. “I'll be back in a moment.”

Once out of the breakfast room, I found Toby still huddling in the atrium. His little legs scurried over to me, and he looked up with a question. “No, I don't have any idea either.”

I called Nightingale's phone, hesitating only a second. He had to come back now, from wherever he was. 

I was going to go with extreme care, but it just came out. “Hello, sir, there's a stroppy girl at the Folly who says her grandmother is your granddaughter. Also, the grandmother looks like she's been overdoing magic. Can you get over here and sort them out?”

There was a long, long pause. “Did—did she give her name?”

“She says it's Kismet, but somehow I doubt that.”

When he walked in he was paler than he should be, even for the cold. It had started raining and drops were beading in his hair. He handed his wet coat to Molly and entered the breakfast room.

The girl—her hair was darker than his, and she didn't have his pale grey eyes—but then she was four generations removed— sneered at him. “Thought you'd never hear from us again, did you?”

He wasn't looking worried, just puzzled. “Who did you say you were?”

“I'm Kismet. I'm your great-great granddaughter.”

“You are no such thing. I have no children.” He was calmer now, although I noticed that he was avoiding looking at the older woman in the wheelchair.

Kismet said with a weary tone. “You had Catherine, didn't you?” She continued to break bits of biscuit for her grandmother.

He did start then. “Catherine died.”

To say I was shocked would be understating it. Nightingale had never mentioned being married, and for several reasons I had assumed—well, I had thought he was gay since the first time I'd met him. He'd never said either way, and of course I never asked him. I'd never known him to date anyone.

“Catherine didn't die.”

“I was told she died of measles,” he said grimly, and now I couldn't keep my mouth shut.

“You—were married? When? You never said anything?”

“Because it was never any of your business.” He snapped at me, with narrowed eyes. Since I'd been living with him for several years I could tell that he was not actually angry, more sad, and more—like fear.

“Not surprised he never said anything,” the strange girl smirked. “She was pregnant.”

Nightingale closed his eyes and I saw his jaw muscles clench. When he opened his eyes again, he spoke mechanically, with no emotion.

“Mary and I were married in 1925. She died in 1926.”

“After she had the baby.” 

“Yes, a month after she had the baby. Her family came to get Catherine, and I've never seen her since. They told us—they sent a message”—his voice faltered a bit, then firmed up. “I was told that Catherine died of measles a few months after she left the Folly.”

He took in the girl's face, looking seriously at her as if he could detect any signs of a long ago child. “She didn't die?”

I was getting too curious to even wait for this answer. “Did she live here at the Folly with you? Your wife?” 

I wasn't sure I knew the proprieties of the early 20th century, but I had the idea that wizards didn't marry, at least while they were active. Nightingale had told me that he'd been all over Europe and Asia during the '20s and '30s, and I just couldn't see some woman staying here at the Folly while he was gone. Come to think of it, how had he met anyone at all? His whole world since age eight had been male, from Casterbrook on. The only women I could think of he'd been around normally would have been like Molly—servants—I had a bad taste in my mouth. But Nightingale—he just wouldn't take advantage of any girl. I knew his fierce upright nature.

He ignored me. “She didn't die? Catherine—lived? Is she—do you—of course you must—is she still alive?”

“Yeah.”

I saw a strange expression on his face. Shock, surprise, and something like joy were emerging on his face, to be put down again by the girl's next casual statement.

“She's in a care home outside Wapping. Doesn't really know anybody anymore.”

He sank down in a chair, where Molly had a cup of tea waiting for him, and for the first time since I'd known him, lost control of his feelings for an instant. He closed his eyes again, bowed his head, and put his hand over his mouth. When he looked up a moment later and reached for his tea, his hand shook a bit.

“And she”— he looked at the woman in the wheelchair, taking in the signs. Fragile. White hair. Drooping mouth, one side of the face dragged down. Her stroke—if it were a stroke—had obviously affected her more than it had Albert Woodville-Gentle. He'd been cheerful and quite conversational when me and Lesley met him.

“That's my Gramma. Elizabeth. She's Catherine's daughter.”

Nightingale turned to glare at Kismet. “How did this happen to her? This is—not a usual stroke, I think.”

Kismet shrugged, picked up her own teacup, and finished it. I noticed that her fingernails still had some green polish clinging to them. The nails were surprisingly well manicured otherwise. She looked over the remainder of the tea service Molly had set, and reached out for an untouched cream bun. She was calmly raising it to her mouth when Nightingale spoke sharply.

“Kismet. Tell me what caused this, if you know.”

The brat shrugged, took a bit of the bun, and, deliberately to be offensive, I thought, spoke with her mouth full.

“Ober diddit, dint she?”

Nightingale had gone through more facial expressions in the last half hour than I'd seen him do in the last week. I was still stunned that he'd ever gotten married (and why this had never come up I didn't know.) He'd been pretty private about his brothers and sisters, but this—I never thought he'd go so far as to hide a wife.

“Kismet.” He was glaring, patience obviously peeling away. 

The girl finished the bun, and delicately wiped her hand on the good linen napkin next to her plate. When she turned to him again, it was with pride and fear that she said,

“She overdid it. The magic. You know.”

“She could not have learned magic. She was never trained anywhere; I've have heard of that.”

“You don't have to be trained.” She opened her hand. I realized that she'd been waiting for this moment ever since she bellowed her way into our doors. On her palm was a yellow ball, bright and flickering, and she was smirking, triumphant. 

I started to reach for her but Nightingale was quicker. He leaned across the table, slapped the werelight from her hand, and grabbed both her wrists.

“Don't ever do that again.” Now they were staring intently at each other, and I might as well not have been in the room. It was just the two of them in a staredown. She still didn't look anything like him, and since—if—she was really related to him, she'd be a great-great granddaughter, she didn't have much kinship, but I would have thought—Nose? Ears? Shape of eyebrow? Nothing. My family has only a few pictures of two of my great-grandparents—great-grandfather on mum's side, great-grandmother on dad's—but I fancy that I can see a little bit of myself in them. 

In one more generation, though—if I ever had children—would they look like the faded pictures? Impossible to guess. 

Nightingale spoke sharply, calling my attention by to the situation at hand. “Peter. Take Kismet into the kitchen with Molly. Tell Molly to keep her there.”

“Hey! You can't lock me up—let me go!” Not listening to her, Nightingale pulled her up by the hand in which she'd so recently blasted out a werelight, and I wondered whether he could put any kind of Vulcan nerve pinch to keep her from doing it again. Then I took her hand, realizing that she was actually clammy and a little cold. Good. Maybe he'd put a bit of fear into her for a moment. I ushered her into Molly's domain.

When she was gone, Nightingale pulled up a chair next to his alleged granddaughter. I'd always known—well, learned pretty quickly—that he was born in 1900, even if he looked mid-forties—but this woman looked about 80. I couldn't make the numbers track. Later, when I got more data, this pattern emerged. He'd married a woman—a girl—named Mary, in 1925, when she was 15 years old. Their daughter Catherine, who had not died of measles, had apparently had this woman, Elizabeth, in 1947, and she was only 69 years old, not 80. Catherine had lived in London her whole life, until she had to go into the care home.

“Mary had been interfered with.”

(Raped, I interpreted.)

“The father was another practitioner here in the Folly, a Viscount, actually, and”—

I was getting the measure of things. I had little use for English nobility, and this went further into my files against them. “And he wouldn't marry her.” 

Nightingale shrugged. I noticed the hideous faded red flocked wallpaper on the breakfast room wall yet again—the Folly's decorators had terrible taste, I'd long ago decided. I had been tempted to suggest to Nightingale that we update at least the rooms we used. I had worked one summer with a remodeling crew, before I knew that me and architecture were not destined to be together, and still remembered how to strip wallpaper. Then some lighter color paper, eggshell, I thought, and the room wouldn't look so small and grim. But small and grim was the mood of the day, and the furnishings didn't matter.

“Evelyn might have married her, if his family had come down more firmly on him.”

I had forgotten how old English boys' names had transferred to girls' as decades went by, leaving these odd whispers.

“So—they didn't want to make him do the right thing.”

“He drowned, actually. He and a friend had taken a catboat out on the river when a storm came up and they couldn't make it back.”

I wondered idly whether Mama Thames had been punishing bad wizards, then remembered that she hadn't come into being until 1957.

“So they made you instead.”

He looked over my head to the damned flocked paper. “There were several reasons why it was felt best that I be the one.”

I could think of one, beside the fact that apparently Nightingale's family, good wizards though they had been, were socially well below Evelyn's. I'd bet that even though the Folly was proud of Nightingale's accomplishment—the Nightingale, as I'd heard so many times, they didn't want someone so special being thought of as an invert. (I'd had the odd moment when I looked into historical homophobia, for reasons I can't quite explain.)

So—Nightingale had been forced into marriage, and then the girl—fifteen years old!—had borne a child.

“She died during the delivery?” I thought that was what generally happened,

“No, a month later. From complications of bleeding and infection.”

He'd been with her, I could tell by his weary expression. He wouldn't have deserted a wife, no matter how little he'd wanted one. I thought about his being a widower at 26, around my age, and couldn't quite imagine it. If I had married Beverley and she'd died—the Rivers weren't actually immortal, even if it had been filth and pollution that had killed off Father Thames' boys in the 1800s. Leaving the lower Thames to be claimed by Mama Thames, formerly a suicidal Nigerian student nurse who'd walked into the river to die, and emerged a goddess. If Bev had died, and I didn't know that a child had survived, unknown to me—I was getting distracted again.

Well, it would have helped simplify his life after that. He could be thought to have mourned her so much, been so scarred, that he never wanted to marry again. And maybe that was true—even if he favored blokes, which I still didn't know—maybe he would have married at some time, if he hadn't gone through this experience. But we were getting far astray.

“You were never there to teach her—nobody would have taught a servant anyway—so where did she”—

“We'll have to find out.”

“Grandfa'” said Elizabeth, and I realized we'd been ignoring her.

Nightingale reached for her hands, gently, testing the strength and doing the simple tests for a stroke. I knew she'd be getting popped into Walid's MRI as soon as we could make arrangements. 

He looked at me, now with a definitely sad expression. “Catherine was alive, in 1947, when this girl was born. She was barely in her 20's. No one ever told me. I wonder why. I didn't want to marry at all, but I—the baby—such a beautiful child.” 

I thought I knew a bit of what he was thinking. By 1947 he'd come home from the war, from Ettersberg, and hidden inside the Folly. If he'd known he still had a living daughter, and a granddaughter—if he'd known—he might have broken his hermitage, never gotten in the habit of staying in the Folly for months or years at a time. So many things might have been different. He might have been aware of evil practitioners developing sooner, before they got stronger. Or not. The Faceless Men had hidden themselves pretty well.

Kismet might be lying, though, just to keep Nightingale from seeing Catherine again, for whatever spiteful reason, and I said so.

“We'll have to get out to Wapping as soon as we can. She might—be more aware of things.”

He shrugged. “She never knew me anyway, never even knew Mary,” but he looked thoughtful. He had known her, after all, even if it were only for a month almost a century earlier. A daughter is still a daughter, even if she's 90 years old and very frail. 

“I wonder whether Elizabeth is ill, beside her stroke. We'll have to ask Kismet.”

Nightingale frowned. He placed a hand on her forehead, exactly like my mother used to do when checking me for fever. But then I heard a whisper and felt his signare. The woman closed her eyes, and seemed to be more comfortable. He took her hands, with their arthritic fingers—such a contrast to his strong and careful ones—and held them for a few seconds, still whispering. Then he touched her shoulders.

Now, I know that magic can't heal you. We wouldn't have had to spend so much time in UCH if it could.

“What are you doing? You can't cure anything.”

He glanced over at me, and smiled a little. “I'm not curing. I'm just warming her so she'd feel better. It's a tiny lux.”

“And—the whispering?” I realized when I'd said it that this was rude. He probably had any number of things to say to his unknown granddaughter.

He ignored me. 

“Elizabeth? I am your grandfather, Thomas. You are here in my house, and we will take care of you.”

That was news to me. I thought that the wretched girl would insist on dragging her charge away, then realized that he would never let go of her. Too precious a gift to be lost again.

There was a loud clang from the kitchen, and I hurried in, leaving him sitting next to her, holding her hand. 

Molly was standing in front of her oven, holding a skillet, glaring, showing all her teeth. When she got into those states, she terrified me. She made me remember when humans were tiny little mammals running away from everything, and I tried very hard to avoid ever provoking that stare.

The girl had crossed her arms and was staring back, arrogant. As a trained police officer I saw her heightened stress, though. Her high ponytail left the side of her neck exposed, and I could see a fast pulse beat. She was breathing a bit fast—I would too, I thought, if I'd ever disgraced Molly's kitchen by throwing a measuring cup across the room.

Kismet whirled to me. “Let me go! You can't hold me here!”

We could, actually, because it was our nick she'd burst into. 

“Give me your name and address—and all the information about your family—and I'll be happy to let you go.”

She glowered at me, and looked as if she wanted to run, but I was between her and the door. I'm not sure what I would have done if she'd hit me. It would be assault on a police officer, and I could arrest her, but it would be a little ridiculous. We had no cells to hold anyone, and if I hauled her to Charing Cross—people would laugh at us. At the magic cops not being able to handle an annoyed teen. She gave in, and the family history finally unraveled.

It was all girls—Mary to Catherine to Elizabeth to Melva to Kismet.

Nightingale's wife—the whole idea of that was still amazing to me—was Mary, no surname known, born 1910, died in 1926 after the birth of:

His daughter, Catherine, born 1926, now 90, in care home, not aware of anything, apparently—actual biological daughter of Folly wizard Viscount-Evelyn-something, a right bastard.

Catherine had married Alister Graham, and had one daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1947. Mr. Graham had run off or died, or something—Kismet did not know, but she finally came up with useful information.

“Gram did the party lights, dint she? Cos she needed the money.”

This put me in mind of one Mr. Nolfi, who'd burned his hands doing party lights with lux which he learned, he said, from his mother. But Mary had died. So—where had her daughter learned it to show Elizabeth? Kismet shrugged. Another thing she did not know was the name of the family who had taken in Catherine.

Elizabeth, Kismet's grandmother, and I was still getting my mind around the fact, Nightingale's granddaughter, had done party lights to supplement her after working as a cleaner. She'd been able to set little lux balls dancing around the room, enchanting all. The only reason she hadn't had hyperthaumaturgical degradation sooner was that she'd only done it for the last year.

When Kismet told me that, I had to steel myself. A year ago Nightingale had an intact granddaughter, alive and alert. Then she was tempted by magic, somehow learned to produce it, and now she'd overdone something she shouldn't have been able to do in the first place. Maybe Dr. Walid could get her some kind of therapy before she continued to deteriorate. I had seen death from magical overuse before, though, and wasn't hopeful.

“And your grandfather? How is he?”

A shrug. The males in the line were all proving to be louts, because Kismet had no idea where her grandfather was. He'd disappeared long ago.

Finally we came to Melva, the great-granddaughter, who was born in 1972 and was a very sensible woman. She wouldn't touch magic at all, and sneered at it. She was divorced from Kismet's father, although he still mooched around now and again, looking to get a handout. Melva worked as a nurse at UCH, and apparently did give her ex-spouse money, in return for what—Kismet didn't know. 

And finally Kismet Angleton, now 16, trying magic on her own, despite the awful warning of her grandmother, who flung out her address, and because I looked very hard at her, her mobile number.

Then she was flying out of the kitchen past me, down back through the breakfast room, to the front door, abandoning her grandmother, and slamming, again, the doors of the Folly.

“Kismet! Stop! Police.” Which was just ridiculous, but it was instinctive.  
I ran after her, and I'd have caught her, I run fast, but there was a green Ford Fiesta huddling just down the road, and she jumped into it. I didn't even have time to get the registration number. 


	2. Melva

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next morning.

We put Elizabeth in one of the first floor bedrooms, and Molly got her changed into what must have been one of her own spare nightgowns. It didn't fit, but I knew Molly would have it off her in the morning, altering it. It wasn't late at all, but Elizabeth was clearly exhausted. After Molly had her settled, Nightingale went back in to look her over. I followed him. He frowned at me and started to tell me to leave, but decided I could stay. We were looking for any signs of elder abuse, after all.

But beside the typical old-age bruises on her arms, slow to heal, there was nothing until Molly gently turned her on her side, and we could examine the back. Nightingale suddenly tensed. I wasn't a doctor, but I could see the pink-red patches across her buttocks. The beginnings of pressure sores. 

“She will need turning every two hours.”

Molly just nodded, and whisked away to quickly return with a jar of salve. He frowned at it, checked and shook his head. I was glad he'd refused. The stuff was dark green, and, I later learned, was exactly the same kind as they'd been supplied with in the second world war.

I disappeared to the tech cave after we got Elizabeth settled. The whole thing seemed more bizarre by the moment. Why had the girl come, yelling about magic, then running away leaving her grandmother?

A few hours later, after finished watching my favorite Star Trek move, comfort viewing, I settled down in my bedroom. We could get some answers tomorrow, starting with yours truly, I assume, trying to track down a girl I'd rather not see again.

So much for plans. 

We had finished breakfast, and Nightingale was going over my Greek assignment, thoughtfully. He pointed out a couple of words I'd mistranslated, but otherwise was pleased. Then there was loud pounding on the Folly doors, again.

It was a short white woman with dark hair who could only be Kismet's mother.

“Where is my mother?” she yelled. And a few seconds later, not quite an afterthought, “and my daughter?”

“Mrs. Angelton? Come in. We have Elizabeth sleeping here, but if you would care to check”—and of course she rushed in. 

She followed me and Nightingale, and swept inside the bedroom. Elizabeth stirred a little as we came in, and Melva started to look her over.

I didn't wait for Nightingale. “We found pressure sores. Can you tell me about those?” 

Melva looked shocked. “Never!” But she saw them too, and sat down quickly in the bedside chair, holding back tears.

“That bitch! That little bitch! I give her one job to do, one job, since she won't go to school and refuses to look for work!”

She continued venomously, “I work twelve hour shifts in the emergency department at University Hospital, and she won't do anything. I would have put her out months ago except for my mother—she's supposed to be taking care of her and look at this! She must be putting her in front of the telly all day, never moving her.”

“Kismet brought her here yesterday afternoon,” I said, a little surprised that Melva hadn't missed her.

She went off into another tirade. “'Kismet.' That's not her name! Until three months ago she'd always been Cats, but now—the little slut— she's not taking care of her grandmother and—she's here too, is she?”

She looked ready to shake Nightingale—what was it with these Angleton women and their casual approach to violence? 

But he shook his head and I got in a word. “She left yesterday, about 2 pm, and I don't know who she was with. She got into a green Ford fiesta.”

I was wondering why Melva hadn't missed her mother before this, but she answered me. “Not them again! Kev and Derek, those bags of worms! If she's messed up with them I don't know what—the hospital called me in for an additional half-shift yesterday. I had to go in at one, as soon as I got up.”

No wonder she looked exhausted. Eighteen hours in one of the busiest emergency departments in London, getting home to wherever the working class held onto 3 bedroom apartments these days—or even 2 bedroom if Melva shared with her mother, not finding either one, and—how had she known to come here?

“That's all she's talked of for weeks. 'The Folly has to be rich, sitting there in Russell Square, and he's a DCI. He probably won't want them to know we're chavs.'”

“Well, I slapped her then. She might try to act like one, but we're good working class. And now where has she gone?”

Molly had silently slipped into the bedroom and nodded at Nightingale. I'm not sure how he interprets her gazes, but he urged Mrs. Angleton to the breakfast room, where Nightingale and I had hardly eaten any of the usual lavish spread. I considered telling Melva that we'd finally learned what Molly did with all the extra food—donated it for meals for the poor. 

But Melva didn't say anything, just took two pieces of bacon and toast, and coffee. She looked at the silver, the salvers, the spotless linen—adding up the cost, probably. She took a bite of toast and a sip of her coffee, and then said, in a quieter tone, “What did she want? Money, I guess.”

Kismet hadn't actually said what she wanted, just showed Nightingale her werelight, but Melva continued.

“She thinks the Folly owes her—owe us—something, I don't know why. She keeps saying, 'They gave Mary and Catherine money, they owe us, too.'”

Nightingale nodded. “The Folly settled 800 pounds on Mary, and 400 on Catherine. But there was never any provision—no one knew about the rest of you.” It didn't seem like that much to me, especially if they were trying to cover up a scandal, but he continued.  
“That was several years salary for a maid. They weren't paid more than about 200 pounds a year.”

Melva agreed wearily. “Yes, but somehow—she thinks we're still entitled because—I don't know.”

I cut in to change the subject. “She showed a werelight yesterday. Do you know anything about that?”

The beleaguered mother sighed. “She—I saw it by accident once, when I came into her room. She was sitting and looking at that stupid ball in her hand, and—I lost it. I slapped her hand, shook her. Why would she ever want to try something that has put her mother in that chair? I don't understand it.”

We found out a bit more that evening. Melva had left Elizabeth with us—she didn't really have a choice with Kismet—Cats—gone, and she still needed to return to work that evening.

There is typically a lull in the day between the time I finish our case paperwork and my firing range practice and when Molly's ready for us again, which I normally fill productively by lying on the couch in the coach house. I don't usually watch the news, but was idly surfing today when I saw this report by an amused presenter.

“Finally, this evening, we have at an attempted robbery at a Shop'NDrive. The three teens, two boys and a girl, who were wearing gray hoodies, entered the store and went to the crisps aisle. The boys picked up packets of crisps, but when they came up to pay, the girl attempted to throw something at the clerk. He said he ducked, but then saw she was not holding anything. She looked at her hand again, and flicked her fingers at him several times. The boys seemed to expect something too, and when nothing happened, they ran out the door, throwing down the crisps. You can see it all here.”

And of course you could see it all, because no microprocessors had been slagged with magic and the CCT cameras caught everything. The big dull looking boys, white, one with blond hair and one brown, stared at Kismet as she furiously opened and closed her hand several times. I could have told her that it's almost impossible to do magic when you're angry.

They hadn't learned their lessons, though, because they tried the same thing at another Shop'NDrive two hours later. This time, she did produce a werelight, and fried the microprocessors, but had the mistake to do so in the presence of an off-duty Sahra Guleed. Sahra caught Kismet, although the boys ran off. 

Sahra's based out of Belgravia, and had become our official liason between the public and our “weird bollocks.” She detained Kismet, and got her back to the nick, with Kismet yelling about Nightingale all the way.

“This one says she's your guv's granddaughter and you'll take care of her. And she made one of your little fireballs, even if it didn't do anything, so we could consider her armed.” Sahra sounded stroppy enough to put Kismet away for a long time, because she had interrupted Sahra when she only wanted a coffee before going home.

“Let me come down and talk to her. Please don't charge her yet.”

Kismet was still in yesterday's clothes, which I was not happy to see. She must have stayed with the boys the entire time, and I remembered being 18. She tossed her ponytail and sneered. “Now you've got to take care of me. He won't like me running around London, will he?”

Self-destruction was going to get her into trouble quickly.

I stared hard at her and she hunched into herself. “I should let Sahra charge you with a weapon, since you tossed a lux at someone. Even if it doesn't do any harm, it's considered assault, do you know that? You're going to end up like your grandmother ('if her mother doesn't beat her enough,' my mother's voice said in my mind.)

“Come on, we'll get you out of here. Then back to the Folly.”

She wasn't grateful at being let go, and turned to run when we stepped out of the nick, but then—it was dark, that's all I can say. A car pulled to the curb in front of me, but it wasn't the green ASBO. It was dark and sleek, and two men opened the door, grabbed Kismet, and pulled her inside. I was startled, but still threw one of my skinny grenades. They weren't going far with their engine killed. But when I did, it was hit by something which made it sizzle out, leaving a sharp 'crack' and the smell of burning paper.


	3. Fleet and Ziggy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The river goddess connection.

I hadn't fried my own phone, mostly because I've now got an ingrained habit of flipping that battery interrupt switch as soon as I get near Falcon-associated cases, and called Nightingale.

“Sir, Kismet was abducted the minute I got her out of Belgravia. It was the Chinese.”  
I remembered the woman I'd met at Ryan Carroll's show. Madame Teng had produced something like this in front of me, but it hadn't done anything except startle me. I realized I had no idea what Taoist sorcery was capable of. 

He was sharp with me. “Are you sure it's their embassy? Or someone private?”

It had looked like an embassy car, but I realized I'd made an assumption. All black BMWs look alike and I'd not been able to get the index. It made more sense for it not to be the embassy. At least I hoped so. I hurried to the Jag with only the vaguest of idea of how I would follow them, knowing that I had to. Failure, as they say, was not an option. Before I reached the car I heard chattering machines and smelled wet dog and machine oil. A muscular black woman in a tight blue dress was striding toward a black Mercedes. She was wearing four inch yellow heels, too fancy for day dress, and was followed by a border collie.

“Fleet!” I yelled, “over here!” Because there was no coincidence that we were after the same thing, even if I didn't know why yet.

“Can't!” She yelled back, clicking her key fob to unlock the car.

“Got this?” I called to her. I'd reached the Jag and pulled out the blue spinner. She hesitated a second, looking at the Mercedes.

“Come on, I know you've got people for that.”

With a grimace she rushed to the Jag and swung into the passenger side. Ziggy, the Captain of her dogs, quickly hopped into the rear seat. There was still a smell of wet dog in the air, though I knew he would be perfectly dry. 

“Are you working for them, then? The Chinese? Your mother isn't going to like that.” I started the car and headed out into the one-way traffic of Buckingham Palace Road.

Ziggy, one blue eye and one amber, stared at me. I was deeply unimpressed, and gave him the Look. Fleet gave me a look of her own, with a familiar tug, which made me angry.

“Stop that. Your entire family has tried it on, and it's not going to work.” 

She just shrugged. “I was following them, not with them. There is a group selling fake traditional aphrodisiacs.”

I groaned. This was getting worse by the minute. “Powdered rhinoceros horn and tiger penises, I assume.”

“You don't really want to know.”

“I don't, but—isn't having fake—things—better than have the real— wouldn't it be better to have fewer tiger penises on the market?”

I tried not to imagine this market and concentrated on my driving. In the Victorian era, London's horse carriages moved traffic at a creaky 15 kph. Today, with modern cars—it was about the same. The blue spinner wasn't helping much, because there just wasn't any room for cars to move over.

“No, extending the market with fake preparations just brings costs lower, and more buyers come in—then expectations of availability increase demand again. The fakes they're making use glamour to permanently hide any differences. They've stolen the paper used in casting spells, to use for this glamour. The embassy completely denies any of this, you know.”

I wondered whether “permanently glamoured meant the same as “haunted.” I'd have to ask Nightingale. 

“So—fake horns, fake—what would you use instead of a tiger?” I did not want to know, truly did not, but had to laugh when she told me.

“Dog dongs? Can't they tell the difference in, oh, I don't know, size, something—smell?”  
I looked at Ziggy in the mirror and he curled his lip. I did not quite kiss my teeth to him. 

“Large breeds. That's the problem. They're attacking wolfhounds, mastiffs, Great Pyrenees.” Her voice rose with anger. 

I decided immediately that I did not want to know any more about the dognapping for parts business. I was only trying to find Kismet before she could give herself a stroke. But I gave Fleet the attention she wanted.

“So we're following dognappers?”

“Just go. They're getting ahead of us.”

Finally there was some room, and I used the spinner to get us down across Ebury Bridge, where she began to give me turn by turn directions. After another turn I saw the BMW ahead of us. I glanced at her and saw her purse her lips and scowl. Goddess or no, I can tell when someone's about to lie to me.

“Fleet. Just tell me.”

She glared at me then.

“The Chinese aren't that interested. They always completely deny everything. It's an animal rights group—I've put them in touch—following the dogs. Robert and I are following the paper.”

Robert Su was Madame Teng's associate, who interpreted for her at that art gallery. The Taiwanese sorceress had insisted on knowing who my master was, and Fleet had answered for me, telling her it was Nightingale. I didn't know why that was important to her, but such are the ways of capricious wizards. Madame Teng had demonstrated some kind of spell to me, a forma which produced the snap and crackle I had recognized.

Fleet was still being vague, and I was tired of it. I wasn't some chauffeur. “And this paper has something to do with their magic, does it? Their sorcery? How does that work? Really, I'm very interested.”

She grimaced again. “The paper is sensitized in some way. Prepared in China and brought in. Then someone can inscribe the spell into it.”

I couldn't quite get it from here. Madame Teng's spell had smelled of burned paper, but I didn't see any.

“And then what? They carry reams around with them? Scans?”

“In some way we don't know,” and I could tell her it chafed her to admit not knowing something, “They then burn the paper and transfer the magic into themselves.” 

She leaned back against the seat. “Not everyone learns magic the way the Isaacs do,” she said, following my thought. “Not everyone has to practice for ten years.”

I thought about this. It made some sense, considering the number of times I'd had to practice opening my hand to produce my first lux. I could see someone writing, “I will make a fire with my hand” several hundred or thousand times. I also thought about how any special paper would make its way into Britain—twenty foot containers seemed the best way, and how would it involve Fleet?

“How are you concerned with this, really? Because you're messing me around.”

She grimaced. “It would be so much easier if you would just drive. Wouldn't you just take my word for it?”

“I'm going to pull over right now if I don't hear any answers.” 

“Fine. Madame Teng will be furious, but I'll tell you. She had a group of boys—four of them—staying with her to polish up certain spells that the other sorcerers couldn't teach. Like a seminar—she came over from the US again for them, has taken a mews house. The boys are from Taiwan, and—I guess she didn't vet them very carefully, because apparently their parents had her same political views.”

I thought back to that exhibition again. Madame Teng had gone off on a tirade, in Chinese, about the two Chinas, while Robert told me to nod my head in agreement. She'd been very intense, and I could see her, even the strong sorceress that she was, getting blind-sided over politics.

“So—these boys were only with her a few weeks, long enough to get comfortable with her house and its routines. They've played her and stolen her paper.”

“The spell paper?” Us Isaacs relied on the Latin and Greek we crammed into our heads to use our spells, not paper we burned, but even Nightingale would be lost without our libraries. I shuddered.

“Yes. It's about 3 to 5 bales, at 100 kilos a bale.”

“How many spells can you get out of 300 kilos of paper?”

“I have no idea. A lot. Will you please just _drive, now_?”

She tried to glamour me again, but I shook my head. “Driving. Don't mess me around again.”

“Good. Because I think we've only got until the next high tide. I think—they stole it today, and I personally wouldn't stay in this country with a sorceress after me.”

I wondered on what level she was following the paper. Fleet Street had seen a lot of publishing and printing over the centuries, I remembered—possibly paper would also smell differently to her. Could the goddess of the Fleet River somehow follow the paper the Taoist sorcerers used? Perhaps she was following the scent of Kismet's wizardry as well, weak though it was, even through all the odors of Central London. Tyburn had claimed to have smelled my stink when I was buried deep under Oxford Circus station.  
*****  
We lost them somewhere near the Deptford dock area, but parked on the edge of the river and started to search. The area has been the subject of great plans for decades. I had seen the site maps, and was particularly interested in the redevelopment of the Olympia Shed. It had been a huge ship-building site, and the plans for its renewal pitched it as the place for the resurrection of HMS Lenox, a 17th century warship. But the financing hadn't come, and it was all just pretty drawings.

Deptford dock was a mix of expensive flats built only a few streets from still derelict wharfs. The docks themselves had been unused for years. There was even another paper connection here, because they had historically been major importers of newsprint.

Unused does not mean unusable, which I knew. A small boat could easily find an old wharf to tie up to, even in the shadow of clubs and markets. Small unstable spaces under docks could be patched up and braced where needed. We parked the Jag and prowled for a couple of hours. Ziggy ranged backwards and forwards around us on the muddy bank, yipping at Fleet occasionally. I couldn't tell if this was any special type of communication to the goddess, or the same kind of yapping Toby does. Was there any way of getting Fleet to let me study Ziggy's sensitivity to magic when this was over, comparing it to Toby's? I was still in search of that elusive magical specific unit of measurement. I hoped it wasn't going to be like finding the Higgs boson.

Fleet's heels seemed as sturdy as my Doc Martens, and she kicked through rubbish like a footballer. We finally called a halt, and went back to the Jag. It was after 9 pm then, and I drove tiredly to the first pub I could find, only a few streets from the silent wharves.

Since I was driving I had only a half pint of bitter, but I also necked a bottle of water in two swallows. Fleet squeezed lime into her sea breeze, and sipped it moodily. Somehow Ziggy had ended up at our feet, with his own bowl of water, after Fleet had smiled brilliantly at the waiter. I was too tired to call her on it.

After the water I felt better, and said, “Cards on the table, Fleet. Why were you following Kismet?”

She straightened up and let me have a good look at the cleavage of her blue dress. It wasn't magic glamour, and I was uninterested in the female type just then. Also, even though I keep my own hair shaved down to a fuzz, I don't find it attractive on women. It's Beverley's long dreads I find beautiful. I was distracted for a moment, remembering her dark brown body floating in her own river, smiling with the cat's eyes all her sisters shared. 

“I told you, I was following the boys, and they went to Belgravia.”  
She was just a shade too innocent to be believable. Even being an immortal river goddess doesn't mean you're always tops at lying to the police. 

“You were after Kismet. How did you know she was there?”

“She made the telly again, dinnit she?”  
I glared at the goddess. “She just opened and closed her hand. That's not much to go on.”

“She did it again.”

“How did you—”

Fleet smiled as wolfishly as her dogs, and told me.

Kismet's lux on her second attempt at robbery, foiled by Sahra, had blown out all the store's microprocessors. But it hadn't blown out all the ones on the CCT cameras near the store, and the owner of the store had called the news station, because he'd seen the first report. I hadn't seen it, but the smiling presenter had added, “the idiot criminals strike again,” or some such, to the next news segment, with a screaming Kismet being hauled away to the Belgravia nick. I was stopped from pounding my head on the table only by the presence of Fleet, who was sneering at me already.

“But—why? Why do you or the boys want her?”

Fleet studied me. “She's connected with your lot, the Isaacs. Her little fireball—”

“It was just a werelight. She can't make a fireball.”

Fleet smiled again as if I'd said something funny. “She is connected to you—to the Nightingale. It's your type of magic—and he wouldn't want her to come to harm.”

I realized that we were back to the old business of favours and trades. If Kismet had been scooped up at Belgravia by Fleet, she could “protect” her for Nightingale, and he'd owe her.

“And the boys?” I still couldn't figure them out.

She shrugged. “They might think that having a wizard on their side gives them an edge. I don't think they are as powerful as Madame Teng—they've only used a couple of spells since I've been following them.”

The spell that I'd seen wasn't too bad, since it had blown my fireball apart, but I wasn't commenting on that. Instead I began to get the idea that the paper-poachers might be nearly as untrained as Kismet, and so—like the blind leading the blind, they'd headed for a source of magic as revealed on the news. With both Fleet and the Taiwan team after the girl, I couldn't help thinking of the scene in Jurassic Park where the two velociraptors hidden in the tall grass race towards their victims. 

***  
Fleet's driver showed up with her Mercedes a short time later, and I called Nightingale to report the lack of progress.

“I'll come in the Fiesta.”

He can't bring himself to call it the ASBO, but he made good time with it and brought one of Hugh's staffs. I still say staffs instead of staves just to watch him give me the wincing look which means, “I have told you the correct way, and I know you're just doing it to irritate me, you pest.”

Have to take my fun where I can get it. He brought me sandwiches from Molly, so I resolved to quit annoying the immortal and powerful wizard for tonight, anyway.

I'd thought about strategies while sitting with Fleet. If the sorcerers had indeed wanted a source of magic, they might react like the unicorns did, and come to us. If we used impello with the lux, we could knock them out. I'm getting much better with smaller focused impello so that I was certain I could apply the right pressure. Nightingale insisted on searching the good sidewalks as well as down by the edge of the rivers, in case they had come up for a breather and a bit of food themselves. 

We carefully made werelights every hundred of meters or so, waiting for a response. I was getting frustrated and wondering what we could change to attract them. Sending actual fireballs sizzling into a pier might be more dramatic, but could be damaging to a structure, besides summoning the Marine Policing Units. They might be unimpressed with our lurking on a case at the river's edge without informing them.

Which reminded me—it was a bit of news which came up on the email feed. There was a proposed change of acronyms again, just to frustrate everyone. This time it was personal. The FALCON sign was now to be for Fraud And Linked Crime Online. And, if someone hadn't been jacking around our email for fun, we, the good and serious practitioners of magic from Newton on down were supposed to be FUBAR--the Fraud Unit Based Art Retrievals. As we were walking I told Nightingale, and he shook his head wearily.

“I'll talk to the Commiss—” that was all he had time for. They weren't hiding down on the wharves, but had arranged themselves around a huge anchor marking the dock's history. Three of them, boys looking no more than 15, popped out the snapping paper spells which ate our werelights and left us in the dark. We couldn't make lights again without letting them take the magic, and they had obviously adjusted their eyes to the darkness much better than we had. They'd had time to loosen the anchor, and whirled it straight at us. I saw the dark glint of it, and then had my impello going. 

We'd decided earlier not to knock anything back down to the river, since we still weren't sure where Kismet was. That meant I had to angle the impello to throw the anchor onto the neat lawn bordering the anchor walk. It was a heave deep enough into the lawn, I hoped, so they couldn't get it out again. Someone would be unhappy with the grass and dirt which had spewed out, but not my problem. There was another crackle which hit me in the middle of the back and shocked me. It was, I must say, not unlike Lesley's taser. It was hard, but lasted only a few seconds. It was enough to convince me these people, half-trained though Fleet thought they were, still packed enough force to warrant our full-out attack.

Nightingale had concentrated on the source of the taser-spell and the teen's position and flicked out a werelight, a large one, spinning it overhead and illuminating them. He flipped the boy onto his stomach with a casual impello inflectentes, and by then I was on him with the magic-resistant cuffs.

Me and Nightingale had been able to forge more of these cuffs. When we had the Night Witch as our guest, he'd said that he'd used the last pair for her. I kept thinking what a useful creation it was, and spent days trying to find it, from the paper card files. When I had a couple of months free from Greek, I was going to digitize them, but no time now.

There was something in Holdings, Vegetable, and the bracelets didn't seem that hard to make. Between the braids of various be-spelled steel alloys, there were small hollow tubes carrying plant material, which erupted if the tube was broken in twisting the braids. Specifically, Datura, mountain glory seeds, and others. The idea was that no one could cast while hallucinating and vomiting; there were also lovely side effects like liver and neural damage. Apparently this was created prior to the Geneva Conventions. I had pulled the reference card and the actual construction guide, planning to show it to Nightingale. I wanted to destroy it completely but thought I should ask him. He'd protected the Black Library for 70 years, but that didn't mean he wanted those unethical spells around to be read.

So when I cuffed the teen Chinese practitioner—he couldn't have weighed 65 kg—I was very glad I'd gone and found something else.

I'd tried everything I could think of. Anti-Practitioner Gear, Personnel Containment—no. There was a Wizard's Daisy Chain—but it was a fancy way to make jewelry for your girl. What the hell would you call a magical binding? Hadn't I checked Bindings? Yes, but when I rechecked, I had missed a V. K-E. notation on one. One idle afternoon I had looked up Victorian homosexuality, for some reason, and found that in 1894 Wizard Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in his Psychopathia Sexualis, had written about “paraesthesia — misdirected sexual desire.” He'd put homosexuality/bisexuality, sexual fetishism, sadism, masochism, and pedophilia in the same list, the bastard.

There was finally a helpful link from “Bindings, VKE,” to “Rope, sexual.” Yes, some of the Folly's wizards had let their magic be removed during sex. You had to be pretty confident of your partners to do that. 

When I showed Nightingale he was shocked. “There were taboos! No-one of my acquaintance practised this!”

“We're just lucky someone did, then.” 

We got on with it. These also relied on multiple twisted braids. These self-reenforced—repairing broken strands by the imbedded magic. It was complex, but had been produced by panting young wizards, and no inventiveness had been spared. We now had six pairs.

 

I yanked the young wizard upright. The other two had disappeared into the dark—I noted that they'd popped the streetlights out in the standard manner for all criminals. 

“Where are they?”

He pretended not to understand English, and I shook him. We could search all the wharves in this area, but there were still hundreds of meters between them. We also didn't have a Met presence here, and there were no waiting vans to pop him into. This was hardly an ideal interview location, but with a hostage situation I needed information as quickly as possible. A pity that London hadn't invented fast-penta yet. Although that would also qualify as hostile interrogation under duress, I thought that its use in emergencies would be much easier to justify to the DPS than getting out the phone books. I had never abused a prisoner and didn't intend to start now, but I wondered about whether or not Nightingale would—and whether I could stay with the Folly if he did.

Someone else arrived who didn't have the compunctions I did. The first I knew of it, the boy screamed and fell from my grasp, rolling on his side. Metal scythed down from the sky, peeling away from the downed anchor. It formed hoops like croquet wickets which wrapped around him and pinned him to the ground. 

“Shit! What the fuck—” and then I heard the pop and fizzle of burning paper. 

Madame Teng, black pant-suited, wearing half boots and an actual cape, strode down the lawn in silence until she reached the boy. She threw another pop at him, raising a scream once more, and I threw up a shield between her and my prisoner. She turned to me, voluble in angry Chinese, and another milder voice said, “She wants to know how you're planning on getting any information, and thinks she has a better way.”

I turned to see a young Chinese guy with a mop of unruly black hair, goatee beard, and black glasses. Robert Su appeared behind his mistress, following her quietly. He'd also gone with the all-black look and half boots, but no cape.

He came up to stand beside me, and we all looked at the boy. I kept my shield up, swearing quietly. I couldn't let her hurt him, but I was aware that my shield probably wouldn't hold if she really wanted to swat it. It was an impasse which needed to be broken, and it came in the form of Nightingale who calmly appeared and spoke a few words of Chinese. I couldn't understand, but he was using hand gestures as well, pointing and nodding toward Madame Teng. I could follow the good-cop, bad-cop routine in any language. 

“Talk to me, boy, or I'll let the scary sorceress have at you,” seemed to be the gist, and the boy nodded. Nightingale popped the hoops loose with a slight gesture, and hauled the boy back to a sitting position. The boy stuttered out Chinese, and Robert translated. 

“They're about two hundred meters along, but he doesn't think they'll talk to you. They don't care about him since he proved useless by getting captured.”

“Come on, sunshine, show us the way and we'll see about that,” I said, pulling the boy all the way up. Nightingale, Madame Teng, and Robert followed.

The dock had been derelict until about a few days ago, I thought. You could see some of the old posts and sagging planks, but then—the whole thing had been glamoured, I realized, and I couldn't even see the new construction without looking through it. The dock was still short, but had been rebuilt with strong bright wooden boards, and there was a hut at the end. Just large enough to hold a few bales of paper, and a girl, I thought. How much was the damn stuff worth? It would have been seen instantly by the Marine Policing Units without the glamour, and I wished we could do that.

How were they getting it out? Fleet thought that it was with the next tide, which, I checked, was in less than an hour. I could see it—some fast cigarette boat, zipping in, loading quickly, then out again. We reached the dock, with the boy held tightly by me on one arm, and Madame Teng on his other, hissing quietly at him. He looked scared, and like he didn't dare cross her. I wouldn't have crossed anyone who could throw steel like that. 

Once at the dock, he yelled, and the door of the hut cracked open slightly. I couldn't see inside it, but apparently the boy inside had dark-adapted eyes, because he slammed the door shut again. There were yells inside and a short scream.

Shit, I thought. They did have Kismet, and now we had a hostage crisis. No hostage negotiator, except me, when I'd traded myself to the fairy queen, and I didn't think Nightingale would let me do that tonight. Another presence came toward us from the other direction along the river, and I heard clattering machines and smelled dogs again. So—Fleet had probably guessed that I'd call Nightingale, followed us, and possibly had hung back from the brief battle watching us. She came up beside me, and I glared at her, and at Ziggy. Neither was bothered by it.

I was suddenly amused by the visuals of this. At one end of a dock you had the combined might of two Newtonian wizards, a Taoist sorceress, and an actual river goddess, and at the other—several teenaged apprentices probably as scrawny as the one beside me. But they had the girl. Usually you have time on your side in a hostage stand-off, unless the guy is a real nutter. He can usually be worn down by patient listening, a little food and drink—hostage takers not being famous for their quartermaster skills. If you can get partial cooperation, talk him into releasing any ill or elderly hostage, you were half-way there. We didn't have the time. I closed my eyes. Nightingale or I would owe the favor, and I did it as easily as I crossed over to the fairy land.

“Fleet.” I whispered. “Could you—” I gestured to the river with the water level lapping higher against the dock—“give us more time?” I made a pushing motion. I realized it was ridiculous as soon as I had said it.

She stared at me. “It's the whole damn North Sea coming in, you do realize that? Tides are controlled by the moon, or did they not teach that in your comprehensive?”

“I did know. But, amazing as it may seem, they didn't teach the part about river goddesses. I could have done with a proper graph these last few years, names and skill sets. I could still do with one.”

“Come here.”

She jumped straight down into the river, but I couldn't follow. It had already risen 3 meters.

“I'll have a word with Mum,” she called.

The goddess laid her hand on her mother's river, and I felt a deep thrum of power, as I had at the Spring Court. The smell of bananas and diesel oil, of curry and cinnamon, and the tang of salt and seaweed, swept over me for a moment. I had felt the vestigia of Mama Thames before, but never while at the edge of her river as the tide rose. I fell on my knees—I couldn't help it. Fleet raised her hand, and a meter wide section of water scraped clear back down to the river bed, curved all around the dock. The water stacked up high around the clear area, in a movie effect. She smiled as smugly as Noah must have.

“They can't tie up now, so go, climb up the back way. Hurry.”

Not being a river goddess, I couldn't jump down 4 meters, so I lowered myself on my own impello. It had been fun when I first discovered how I could stand on my shield and cast impello below, rising or falling gently on my invisible lift. It wasn't something I wanted to do often, because while casting one spell while controlling several others was easy for Nightingale, I just didn't want to chance breaking my neck looking cool.

I squelched along the small exposed mud flat. Now that I was at the rear of the shack, I hoped Nightingale would have a plan for the front. Could he pop open the door and rush in before they could respond? Would these boys sense a spell forming—probably, I thought grimly. Because it was that type of day.

I heard a crack and boards started flying back, in his patented house-unzipping spell that I'd seen him use with Varvara. Or, I thought, he could just do that, and used my lift-impello quickly. And as he'd done in that battle, while everyone in the shack must be staring at the front walls falling neatly down onto the dock and into the river, I walked into the back. 

Lux and impello are really versatile tools, simple though they might seem. They have dozens of variations, inflectentes, and the strength and size can be manipulated widely. I used my small skinny grenade, patent pending, to burn through the lock of the back door, then reached inside and pulled it open. The noise from the front covered mine, and I was in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FALCON is a new, real life Met designation for their Fraud And Crimes On Line unit. FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition) hasn't been assigned to anyone. (Yet.)


	4. By the Thames

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Convergence of forces.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The work is finished. I'm posting this chapter today and the final one tomorrow.

When I stepped into the shack a whirlwind of white confetti slapped me in the face, completely blocking my vision. I didn't recognize what I was seeing at first, and then realized that it was the sorcery paper which had been shredded into bits. Why would anyone have done that? The paper was touched with gold in places—I don't know why I had assumed it was all white. Possibly different colors affected the strength of spells? There was orange paper too, and even bright red. I wondered whether Taoist sorcery used the entire visual spectrum. I didn't see anything from the blue end, though. When this was over, I wanted to pry a few answers from Madame Teng. The coloured spots were increasing and one suddenly fell on my hand. It stung. Because, I realised quite calmly, it was a spark. Paper. And fire. Dear god, what had Kismet got herself into now?

My _aqua_ spell is much better now, and I immediately pulled a water ball into my hands. I started flinging it at the top of the paper cyclone, planning to soak down from the roof, but the wind whipped it back toward me in heavy splats. How much paper had been shredded? I'd finally talked Nightingale into getting a heavy commercial shredder like the rest of the Met used. The resulting bits were no larger than pencil points. Our 8 liter bin held a bit over 100 pages, and that was only a few inches high.

I still had no idea how many pages there were in the bales the boys had stolen. It must be tens, or even hundreds, of thousands. Why had they started the confetti-fight though? The only logical reason seemed to be to hide themselves from Madame Teng, and that would be so they could escape through the door I'd just come in. At least if the whole place wasn't in flames by then. 

How had the fire started, and how big was it? I couldn't tell anything from the back of the shack, just that I didn't smell smoke yet. It wouldn't have been Nightingale's fireball—he wasn't going to blast one where civilians were targets. Had Madame Teng decided to cut her losses and burn down the shack, losing her own paper? Seemed unlikely. I had a very unhappy feeling I knew where the sparks came from. Kismet had been cutting loose with lux,and, unlike what I'd told Fleet, she'd possibly powered up to at least a tiny fireball.

Someone screamed. I couldn't tell even the direction because the paper had now been whipped to the fury of a tornado. If all this ignited, it would flash-over quickly.

“Kismet! Stop it! Get over here!”

More screaming, and it sounded Chinese. No one came toward me. I had to get the fire under control, and I needed many liters of water, not just the one I'd tossed out. That shouldn't be too hard, though, with a river goddess nearby. 

“Fleet! Some help here—can you get me more water?”

There was no answer from the direction of the river, and I risked a step back through the door. “Fleet! We need—”

Small flames licked out the door I'd opened, and I realized that Mama Thames' daughter had disappeared. Fleet wouldn't desert, would she? If she did and everyone died, it would put an end to some inconvenient arrangements. No more wizards, no sorcerers, and a job well done. Tyburn would back her, but Beverley would try to kill her, probably, and I had no idea what Mama Thames would do. What would a battle of river goddesses look like? The Thames valley could be scoured from end to end. I shook my head trying to clear these thoughts. Even Tyburn wouldn't play that game. I hoped. And I had done nothing to antagonize Fleet. 

Nightingale could just rip the rest of the shack apart, I thought. He'd had the power and control to do that when me and Lesley were held hostage in the dog-fighting barn—I fought down another useless recollection. I'd finally realized that she'd yelled too loudly for the goons to call their boss. He was her boss, too, though no-one had known it, and she'd known he wouldn't want her dead.

But I wondered if the blinding paper storm was affecting him as well. He couldn't see me, or anyone else who might have escaped outside through the back door. And anyway, more air and oxygen wasn't what the fire needed.

There was more screaming and I stepped back in again. _Aqua_ it was, until the fire was out or I had a stroke. I lobbed up several liters, trying again to soak the wind-blown paper. With a whirl of impello I started spraying the water in a mist. What I wouldn't have given for a golem to take the fire away.

A figure rushed toward me and shoved me away. It was one of the boys, who jumped off the pier. He was pulling his shirt off when he went over and I smelled smoke. I heard a splash, which meant Fleet had let the Thames roll in again. He needed fishing out, but I didn't have time just then. I hoped he could swim.

How long, how long? Kismet, I knew you were stupid, but I didn't think you'd start a fire in the shed you were locked in.

I heard a crash and crack overhead, and for a moment my heart seemed to stop. Surely the rest of the roof hadn't fallen through yet? I put up my modified shield and pushed it through the falling paper and flames. An upside-down fountain poured through the roof of the shack, huge gushes of river water smashing down onto the wood floor. Fleet, thank you.

“Everyone down!” That was Nightingale, in command mode, and I obeyed quickly, slamming my body against the floor. I had no idea what he was going to do and hoped like hell that even the brats would listen to him. I felt a wave of energy sweep through the shack, his _impello_ catching the water and spraying it like a fire hose, rotating in all directions. It was like what I'd attempted, only a hundred times stronger.

Moments later there were no more flames. 

The circulating paper, soaked through and plopping to the ground, made a soggy mess. I could see the dark sky above, but there weren't any sirens yet. The fire should attract the attention of the riverside coppers, and if we were unlucky, the marine unit as well. I wanted to get this over quickly. 

I felt a whisper of magic and more confetti rose up whirling. The boys weren't going to give this up easily, no matter how much of their booty it took, it seemed. I wondered again about their plans for escape. Possibly their rescuers would have weapons. 

One cuffed outside, one in the river, two holding Kismet. Or probably one holding Kismet and the other casting. I put up a small werelight to illuminate us, and as I did so was slammed with a headache. What the fuck—I knew how much magic I could safely use, and my last perfectly normal MRI was only two months ago. Was there a spell which took your magic and threw it against you? That was a horrifying idea. If Taoist sorcery could do this, Nightingale really, really needed to come to an arrangement with Madame Teng. The Faceless Man didn't have it, obviously, but who else might have it?

I hurt badly, but my werelight didn't fade a bit. Nightingale had made me perfect them with thousands of repetitions under battle conditions, mostly in boxing practice with him. The better I became, the more he upped the pressure, until his _impellos_ were pounding me far more than his physical blows and jabs. He could beat me to my knees, even slam me onto my back, and I'd never give up the light. I'd learned his dirty tricks, though, and now at least one out of four times I could drop him. 

I'd say it was sadistic, but now after several rounds with Mr. no-longer-unknown Faceless Man, I wanted every advantage I could get. Nightingale had taught me higher order spells so I could up my protection and attack skills. My own fireball no longer just singed paper targets. I could punch through a two-inch thick wood plank. No steel, yet, but I was very gratified to have improved this much.

Plus, I'd wheedled some remodeling out of him, and now we had both a small sauna and a cool bath in a new room next to the fighting circle. He'd scoffed at such luxuries at first, but after I began to slam him down regularly, he appreciated the ability to rest his muscles.

It was, I recognized after only an instant, not a magical headache, but a physical one. I had been whacked on both temples by what was either a blunt object or a very localized _impello_. Shrieking coming from the front of the shack drew my attention from the pain, and I saw Nightingale and Robert Su both struggling with Madame Teng. She was fighting them, and I saw her get a finger free and twitch it. Another slap of _impello_ hit my head. I couldn't figure out why she was picking on me, but then heard yips and groans from behind the paper bale barricade. So she was slamming every head available—perhaps mine was only a side effect? Sloppy, unless she was planning on incapacitating me and Nightingale so she could murder the teen wizards.

“Hey!” I yelled. “A moment, here, madam! If you don't cut it out, you'll provoke him into throwing you headfirst through the dock. It's your damn paper we're retrieving.”

Madame Teng growled, and Nightingale's voice was a little breathy.

“Thank you, Peter, for that threat. I'm sure it will help her calm down.”

I turned away from them towards the miscreants who'd started everything. They had indeed split up roles—one was facing Madame Teng, squinting, no doubt from his headache, but his shaky hand was still up to cast or protect. The second had gone old-school and had one arm wrapped around Kismet. With the other hand he held a knife to her neck. 

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

The first thing about hostage situations is that you should never get into them. The second thing—as I said earlier, the longer a situation is drawn out, the better. Here, though, between fire, water, confetti-filled air, and a vicious sorceress, we didn't have too many elements left to play with. Earth, no, I wasn't an earth-bender like the Quiet People, and I couldn't bring up mud from below to bury them. If I had been able, I still didn't think I could do it. My own hours below ground ranked high in my nightmares.

I did know how to heat metal, and could have raised the temperature on the knife high enough to make him drop it, if I didn't mind blistering Kismet. Same with any _impello_ I had—I was strong enough to bowl them over, but the knife would be faster. I couldn't even use my fireball to cut out the flooring under them, for the same reason. 

What else—force was just no good here, and I didn't have time. What I did have, though,was a minor but confusing bit of play. I controlled my breath, rehearsed the three quick _formae_ and carefully opened my hand. Swirls of blue and green light twisted around the teens' heads. The lights formed into sharp lines which stabbed towards their faces, circling faster and closer. Behind the knives small balls of blue and green light appeared, sparkling and popping open at random intervals. It was no more than a light show—there was no heat at all in the images. The stabs were only virtual, but they were actinic and startling.

Nightingale had showed me this illusion spell, a similar one of which I'd used for Molly's birthday present. We had never been able to determine her actual birthdate, or even when she'd been brought to the Folly, but I decided that she should have Midsummer Eve. Nightingale was amused, but didn't stop me. He gave her three pairs of new socks. You'd think this wouldn't be much, but I'd seen Mum grateful for high-end socks—they were over 10 quid the pair, what with shipping charges. They kept the working woman's feet padded without bulkiness or rough stitch lines. I found him a site online with bamboo-derived ones, and ordered them for him. (Dumbledore would be so proud of him, I thought, but did not say.) He showed me how to give her a light show. For her, my lights were softer and the swirls slower, and they were star-shaped, not stabbing. I'd rehearsed it enough to have full control of all variables, and was now glad I'd had.

There was no pain or physical pressure at all, but the threatening jabs alarmed both boys. The first one to give was the one who'd already had his hands up to cast. He quickly flung them up to cover his eyes. The second one, my real target, let go of Kismet, and put his arm up, but didn't take away his knife. The little snot. I was preparing a quick focused _impello_ to rip away the knife, when he yelped. He jerked his knife hand away from her, and I slammed him to the floor. 

I couldn't work out what had happened, but then Kismet swayed, falling forward. I hurried over and caught her, and saw that her right palm was up, and slightly pink. The fallen boy reached for the back of his neck, and I was so shocked I almost dropped her. She'd singed him, burning a bit of his shirt, and giving him blisters on the neck. Not only a werelight then—like I'd been afraid of, she actually had succeeded in producing a tiny fireball. Goddammit, what were me and Nightingale going to do with her?

I didn't stop though, but quickly flattened this boy as well.

“Madame Teng!” I yelled. “Stop! I've got them.”

“Stand down, please,” said Nightingale. His words were polite, but still had his command voice. Everyone stopped moving. I cradled Kismet against me.

“Damn, girl, that was brilliant, but you can't do it again. You're going to kill yourself.”

She didn't respond, and I realized she'd fainted. 

“Sir! We need to get her to A&E!”

There was a mechanical shout below me For a second I didn't think anything of it, being preoccupied with Kismet. Then I heard a boat's full-throated engine, and loudspeaker barking out orders. The Marine Policing Unit had found us.

%%%%%%%%%%%%

I didn't get to see much of the cleanup, as I went with Kismet in the ambulance to UCH. I'd persuaded the drivers, who fortunately didn't recognize my face, that UCH had the specialist facilities we needed. After Kismet had roused from her brief faint, the only injury she had was a tiny nick on the neck, quickly covered with a butterfly. She didn't even have blisters herself. I insisted though.

“She's had a head injury, and we need an immediate MRI. Our support staff is on duty there.”

Dr. Walid had gladly given Dr. Vaughn the first-responder duty for our night calls. She wasn't best pleased at first, but then turned thoughtful. We talked while Kismet was getting her first taste of the clanging MRI machine.

“You say she taught herself magic? I didn't think anyone could do that.”

“I'm not sure how she learned it,” I said. “We still have to find out. Newtonian magic takes a lot of practice, with careful adjustments by your teacher. Nightingale cut me off after only a few hours a day. I have no idea how she learned, or how much injury she's done herself.”

Fortunately, Kismet had no brain changes at all. Still nothing I could use to beat the danger into her head.

“You need to listen to Inspector Nightingale and to Constable Grant here, young lady,” Dr. Vaughn said coldly. “What you've done is incredibly dangerous.”

I'd tried to persuade the good doctor to lie a little and tell Kismet she'd had some injuries, but she didn't even respond. Medical ethics, I supposed. Well, I'd tried.

“My superior, Dr. Walid, has an entire presentation about hyperthaumaturgical degradation.”

“That's your brain on magic,” I said helpfully.

They both continued to ignore me. The girl had recovered her attitude, and was setting up to be stroppy to Dr. Vaughn, who couldn't be bothered.

Kismet's mother showed up about then, and started to shout at her. The good doctor Vaughn had, as it turned out, a way to handle both of them, with her own version of the Nightingale command voice.

“That's enough, please, Mrs. Angleton. Kismet has had a difficult day, and needs to rest. Kismet, you need to be back here in one week so we can determine whether there are any quickly developing lesions. You cannot practice magic at all.”

I persuaded them to come back to the Folly. It was the middle of the night before all the medical procedures were finished, and Melva wanted to check on her mother as well as see her daughter settled. I left them to Molly, who produced floor-length nightgowns which amused Melva and baffled Kismet.

We caught her, I thought. Caught her in time, despite herself. Job well done. Now we only have to persuade her to stop. I was almost asleep when I remembered. Christ, we weren't finished yet. We had to find out where the hell she'd learned this.


	5. The Magicians

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The magicians

I was the only person to get down to breakfast on time the next morning. Molly glared at me, as she'd gone to more than her usual splendid spread. Since we had three more people in the house, today she had put out something massive enough to feed all my family at Christmas. I smiled at her nervously, aware of our tentative non-aggression pact.

“Did Nightingale get in okay? Is he still sleeping?”

She helpfully rolled her eyes up, saying silently, “Of course he got back home, otherwise I'd be standing in your doorway scaring you awake.”

Fair enough. I helped myself to four slices of bacon, and three of toast. Toby pushed his nose into my leg, but I ignored him. His vet had given me a pamphlet the last time I'd seen her, warning of the dangers of obesity to pets. 

Nightingale came down about fifteen minutes later, dressed very casually in a two piece suit with a sky blue tie over a lighter blue shirt, and a fine jumper that I could classify in the bronze range. Ten points to Ravenclaw, I thought, stunned. Could he possibly have done it deliberately? His eyelids were puffy. I didn't dare ask him any questions.

After a cup of tea, he opened his mouth. “This could have been the worst fiasco since—well, Skygarden, except for—”

Lesley, I thought, except for no Lesley here.

“I managed to bundle it all up for the assistant commissioner, though, even the Marine and Riverside police. They've all heard of us since Skygarden. All I had to do was say 'Taoist sorcery rogue apprentices' and they were happy to let me alone. Marine and Riverside pushed the boys back to me, and I saw them into Falcon-rated cells at Belgravia. I classified the remaining paper as a magical device—there was quite a lot of it, although I don't know whether it can still be used—and released it to Madame Teng at the site.” He looked at me. “It didn't need to be kept as evidence. She fetched a van, and the driver took it away with a hand truck.”

I was disappointed. “Couldn't we have kept any? To test?” I had wondered what experiments to try on something so outside the Newtonian traditions.

“Peter, why would I antagonize Madame Teng?” 

Then he shook out a clean handkerchief, lay it on the table cloth, and reached for the folder I'd seen him slip under his chair.

He opened it and showed me a neat sheaf of thick white paper, maybe fifty pages, smudged at the end, but not burned. It was a little crinkled. 

“Since the integrity of the bales had been lost, I didn't have to pry one open. I thought a few pages might be worth—the time we spent. Madame Teng may also be at home to you one afternoon, when you call her.”

“I'll do that,” I said, eying the paper reverently. So much trouble, and for what? I was dying to take it to the lab.

“Fleet had made her absence, and I let the Marine police assume that I'd pulled up all the water by myself. Arson investigators couldn't tell the difference in any event.”

“They could if they found someone who could sense vestigia,” I said, just to be annoying. 

He smiled thinly. “Then they'd turn that person right over to us, and I'd have to decide what to do.”

Another apprentice, I thought. He's not ruling out taking another apprentice. I was suddenly happy. The Folly still needed to move forward.

“Kismet didn't come into the picture,” he said, and I realized I'd forgotten about her. “You'd already taken off with the ambulance, and I didn't see any necessity to mention her. No doubt we'll tell the DPS all about it, but—I thought it could wait a few days.”

“The boys, though—one of them was burned. His neck and collar were singed. We'll have to explain that.”

He shrugged. “In a burning building, with sparks and embers falling? I'm not sure even that apprentice knows what happened.”

“What about them abducting her?” I said. “They kidnapped her.”

He shrugged again. “Robert Su and I had a conversation with them at Belgravia. If they don't mention abducting her, we'll get them deported without the kidnapping charge. Quickly.”

“But the arson—”

“Accidental, we all agreed. There weren't any accelerants. New sawdust, powder, a lot of confetti—things could happen. Arson investigators won't find anything.”

This was—unprecedented, interfering with an investigation like this. They'd find the one place where the fire started, I thought.

“But I saw her palm,” I said, just to be saying something. “It was—it didn't blister, so—”

“You didn't tell the ambulance attendant about it.”

“I didn't want them to—”

“Recognise you?” He smirked, there was no other word for it.

“Sir, why are you—” I saw his mouth harden. He was as upright a man as I knew, the most honest police officer I'd ever met and now he was bending every way to protect his great-great granddaughter when he'd never tried to protect me after Skygarden—but I knew. I was a sworn police officer and sworn wizard apprentice, an adult half-way through my twenties. She was an teen idiot. His daughter had been taken from him 90 years ago, and he was not letting go of any family now. 

My own jaw tightened, in a momentary spasm of jealousy that surprised me , and I looked away. My own family had never come to rescue me, the years that my father was an active addict. I think it's because of my skin—can't be sure, but I was way too dark for my father's side, way too African with my bad hair, and too light for my mother's. Plus she would have fought anyone who wanted to take me away from her, even if it would have helped me. I swallowed and faced him again.

“Because she can't help herself now. She's a minor and a victim, Peter, and I won't have her caught up before I can sort things out. I will tell the commissioner all about her, but I won't have her arrested for arson, or even interviewed as a witness, if I possibly can. She's too young and too—even if she asked for a solicitor, she'd talk on and on before one came. She has to answer for her theft, and that's enough. I won't have her questioned for arson as well. Or assault.”

“Thank you.” A woman's voice—Melva, I thought—I'd forgotten her too, came coolly from the door to the breakfast room.

“Kismet's made such a mess of herself with her little fireballs, her thieving on camera—god, I cannot imagine I raised such an ignorant child, if you steal you should do it when no one's around. I shouldn't have to tell her that.”

I swung my eyes to her, shocked, and Nightingale did, too. I think he was reconsidering his decision to let her get away with everything, but Melva slid onto a chair, closing her eyes and plunging her palms against them.

“She was raised right, you have to believe me. I didn't raise her to be like this, I worked for hours and hours every day to keep us, my mother had to take care of her a lot, but I didn't raise her to be like this. She—why did she have to steal?”

I nodded. I'd been raised by someone who worked all hours, and part of the reason I never got into gangs was that I'd been kept with her, cleaning, until the late evenings every day, and into the hols as well. Acting up with friends—I like to think I was a good child, and I was, but the lack of time to get into trouble helped. 

Melva took a piece of toast and a cup of coffee.

“I went to see Mum before I came down here. Your maid has already gotten her sitting on the toilet. She's a rare good one—was she a nursing assistant once?”

“She's a good everything,” I said, while Nightingale said, “She took care of me when I was shot. Would have carried me downstairs if I'd let her.”

Melva smiled a little crookedly. “I would love to have seen that.”

He continued, “We have to find out who trained Kismet, though. I mean who trained—Elizabeth.” His voice quivered a bit. Losing a granddaughter—almost losing her, I meant, after being told her mother was dead—this must be hell for him.

The nurse's eyes fell. We waited. 

“I know where she learned. They learned. It was with the Free Women.”

“What—who are—?” I stuttered. “We'd know if they knew—if anyone else knew how—” I stuttered to a stop. We hadn't known about the other female practitioners, had we? 

“They were—an association, almost a commune, without men, a group of the women dispossessed and tossed away from the Folly like simple trash.”

I opened my mouth but she gave me a look.

“Maybe the women didn't know magic at one time,” she said quietly, “but they found out. Have known since your lot was kicking all the girls out for getting pregnant. Didn't you ever think, back then—if a girl has to get up at four to light fires, didn't you ever think she might learn a small shortcut? Since she sees men all around her making fireballs day after day? And if she has to carry loads of laundry that weigh as much as she does, she might learn a little _impello_ —see, I know the word—to make her load lighter? Did any of you ever think where the girls might go? I'm surprised they made you marry Mary. Most of them didn't get married.”

He shrugged his shoulders, obviously not about to go into the Viscount-father, and the possible personal problems I suspected. 

“There were reasons. Mary wasn't the only one to wed. So they took—it wasn't Mary's family who took Catherine, then?”

Melva looked at him. “Mary was in service since she was eight. Her family was glad that she had a place—they had no money to feed another mouth, and certainly wouldn't have taken her child.”

Her mouth twisted. “At that time women who weren't in service had few choices. Prostitution—you can look up the data and see how many prostitutes London had. It—the group—was better than the nothing they'd have alone. They could do laundry and piecework, and clean offices. The Folly wouldn't have them, their own families wouldn't have them. But these women—the Free Women—lived together and supported each other. They never had much, but it was better than dying, and, as I said, the older women—barely older than girls—taught the others what they knew. It was never much—just the simple _lux_ and _impello_ , without much variation, except to make lux hot enough to boil water.”

“Catherine never went to school, did she?” I thought I knew the answer.

“Not as such. But there were some patronesses, some women with social consciousness, concerned about such fallen women, who would teach the girls a few hours a week. They actually hid the magic, you know? I'm not sure if some ever knew.”

She laughed sourly. “So Catherine lived and worked first as a cleaner. But she did learn to read and write. She found a man to charm—not magically, they never knew glamour—and left the Free Women's house. Alister Graham was a servant from one of the grande dames' homes, and they both left to set themselves up as comedians, of all things.” She shook her head and took a large gulp of her coffee. Molly didn't see her or she'd have given one of her fierce frowns.

I was fascinated. “So—did they make a name for themselves?” I was already planning how to research them.

She laughed again. “No, but they got to work backstage at a lot of comedy venues. It paid better than waiting to get an act.”

Nightingale interrupted her, a little bitterness in his tone. “But her husband deserted her, didn't he?”

Melva frowned. “Who said he ran off? My grandfather loved my grandmother. He was killed in a traffic accident. My grandmother got a job cleaning at a school, and then started helping out the teachers. She because a teaching assistant.”

I could hear the love and triumph in her voice. But if she'd been a teaching assistant, where had Elizabeth so disastrously learned her magic? My face tightened. Whoever had taught Elizabeth had screwed her over.

Melva noticed my grimace. “Who do you think Catherine could get to babysit Elizabeth while she was working? It wasn't like the maternity leave they have today. The Free Women took care of their own, even after Catherine was married.”

Nightingale didn't make any sound, but when I looked at him I saw a grimace. He stood up and left the table without saying a word. I knew he was going upstairs.

“What does he think he can do for my mother? Magic damage isn't reversible.”

“He's going to get the best research Dr. Walid can find, and find the best therapists. There are many cases when an aphasic person can learn to write their thoughts, even if they can't speak. They can connect and communicate, even by pad or tablet, and Nightingale is going to do everything he can to help her.” He hadn't said any of this, but I knew that's what he'd do.

My throat was tight. I took another sip of coffee, but could barely taste it.

“Didn't anyone ever notice the strokes? Didn't notice how often the Free Women ended up in hospital? And for godsake, why didn't they ever contact the Folly for help? They never did?”

She shrugged, sadly I thought. 

“I don't know what they were thinking, back in the 20's, the 40's. Mostly just that the Folly had cast them out and they weren't going to be a part of it again.”

“But didn't they send money? I know Nightingale said money had been settled on Mary and Catherine—”

She scowled. “I found out about the coverup—that Nightingale wasn't the father, and someone with a title was. They paid to avoid a big scandal. The rest of the time—it was a men's club, you know. I guess they thought the women would find husbands to take care of them, in spite of the children.” 

She waved a hand a little helplessly. “Then they weren't there after the war, were they? Maybe they'd have changed, I don't know, but there just weren't any wizards alive anymore...except for him, I guess.

I stared down at the table. Nightingale had been living a posh existence, alone in the Folly, while his family was barely scraping by. The Free Women had every reason to hide themselves, I supposed, but the consequences—it was in the past, mostly, I told myself. Melva was fine, except she worked too hard. She'd made a career, anyway. Kismet was fine, mostly.

Kismet chose that moment to come into the breakfast room, yawning. She was barefoot, and still in the nightgown—but then again—Molly was probably finishing folding her clothes. 

“This place ib enorbmous,” Kismet said, deliberately talking again with her mouth full. “Can you give me a tour?”

While I waited for Nightingale to reappear I gave them the abbreviated tour—the two dining rooms, the smoking room, the mundane library with the tall ladders to upper shelves—emphasizing all the Latin and Greek texts. I had no intention of letting Kismet even get a glimpse of the magic library, let alone the firing range, my lab, or the coach house.  
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

I'm not sure what I expected Nightingale to do next, but I might have guessed he'd hold on to them for all he was worth. In the next week he did get testing for Elizabeth and got her started with therapies monitored by the district nurse. He coaxed Melva—charmed her, I could say—into staying at the Folly, also, and then took her to and from work in the Jag. 

He persuaded Molly, how I will never know, to pack lunches for Melva, who received them at first with a bewildered smile. I got a glimpse of one, worrying about the offal load, and my mouth watered. There were sandwiches of various kinds, using ciabatta bread, croissants, and small deli slices, and I could smell the roast beef and chicken. She'd made egg and cress, too. There was a small container of elegantly cut fresh fruit, and an assortment of biscuits, still warm from the oven and wrapped in wax paper. Molly had even tucked in a small thermos of what Melva told me was tea made exactly the way she liked it.

We did have to talk to the DPS, of course, more than once, but Nightingale and I had interviews together several times. I listened in amazement to the way he told the truth, without lying even a little, in such a way that was totally to our advantage. 

When we were back on the street after one such interview I said, “You know that was complete bollocks, sir.”

He gave me a very dirty look. “I've been doing this for over 70 years, Peter. I just haven't had to do so much of it at one time.”

A week later I escorted Kismet back to Dr. Walid for another MRI (still normal, thank god.) I had asked him for the full brain-slice tour, and he gave it to her. She nodded, thoughtfully, or as thoughtfully as a 16 year old could get, I supposed, and started gawking at the lab. In a few minutes, they were in rapt communication.

“This EMPAD—how is it different from other electron microscopes?” she asked, when Walid had shown her his new baby. 

He beamed, starting into a detailed discussion. “The electron microscope pixel array detector yields a wealth of information about the electrons that create the image and, from that, more about the structure of the sample.”

I thought she was having him on, and frowned at her. Was she ever going to take her risks seriously? But she was actually listening.

“The EMPAD records an image frame in less than a millisecond and can detect from one to a million primary electrons per pixel, per image frame. This is 1,000 times the dynamic range, and 100 times the speed of conventional electron image sensors.”

“So it's better for looking at living things?”

Brilliant. Now we were in for in. I stepped back and started browsing on my phone. Cat videos were my guilty secret.

“... a look at processes inside intact cells...time-lapse 'movies' of cellular processes...being used to see how cancer progresses from cell to cell, and I'm hoping to do so with hyperthaumaturgical degradation. I especially want to see whether I can adapt this to see how your grandmother does,” he said unexpectedly, and I mentally applauded him for bringing this back to reality. Although it did sound like he wanted to get brain biopsies from Elizabeth...

She nodded seriously, and kept asking him questions about each piece of equipment, from the cryostat to the centrifuges, looking around her in wonder. I hoped she wasn't pricing them for a grab job, but UCH's security should be enough.

It was surreal. Every trace of her stroppiness was gone, and she was staring in fascination, truly paying attention. I knew she wasn't biologically related to Nightingale at all, but her intensity and concentration reminded me of him. I even found myself sniffing to see if she had any signare.I left them, searching for tea, or even coffee, but the UCH's was just as love-in-a-canoe as it ever was, as Terry Pratchett tells us—fucking close to water—and sat down with my phone again. When I wandered back downstairs, they were sitting at his desk, and he was, no shit, outlining the list of courses she'd need to take to become a pathologist, from remedial course work in high school to university and on to medical school. 

I counted up years, realising that I'd never thought about it. Two more years in high school, 4-5 years at university, 4 years at medical school, 3 years pathology studies—it would be a thirteen year project, just to get to the point where she could do further training in cryptozoology with him. I blinked. She'd be nearly 30 by then.

“You really want to be a doctor?” I still thought she was having him on.

Dr. Walid gave me a glare worthy of Molly, one which conveyed that he'd _just spent two hours_ trying to offer her another option besides magic, petty crime, and early death.

“Sorry.”

“So—can I come back here to visit? I could help you—wash some equipment, maybe?”

“Whist. You don't need to wash anything,” he said, almost tenderly, and I realized that he also was in love with Nightingale's new family.

“Come back and we'll talk about your homework. Will you be staying on at the Folly, then?”

She shuddered. “No. I want to be back in our flat and see my friends. But I'll come over to visit—if I can?” she said, looking at me.

“Call Nightingale. He'll let you know when it's okay.”

“Kismet, call me if you have questions with your biology. Or chemistry. Or—algebra...”  
I stopped him with a glance before he could recite the entire curricula.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%  
The day after Kismet and I saw Walid—after yet another DPS hearing about the magic fire—no, the spontaneous combustion of new sawdust and confetti—Nightingale and I pulled up in front of an modest care home in Wapping. I had wondered what he was waiting for—not to get his nerve up, exactly—but maybe the resolution to see his aged 90 year old daughter. Or at least waiting to visit until the chaos had settled down a bit.

“Do you want me to come in, sir?”

“No. But stay close—in the day room, maybe.”

He'd called ahead and knew what he'd find but it was still—I was still hoping that they hadn't lied to us, hadn't overplayed it.  
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%  
Nightingale walked into the room and saw a fairly plump white woman, her silver hair thinning. She was smirking at her visitors as she triumphantly put down her last domino. 

“Shoo. I'll see you later,” and she waved away an equally elderly couple. 

He sat down in one of the vacated chairs.

“Catherine.”

She shook her head in wonder. “You did tell me about the not aging thing, but I—I still expected you to look in your sixties, maybe. You could be my grandson.”

“I'm not though. I really am your father, and I regret very much it has taken me this long to find you. They told me you had died when you were two months old.”

“I know. Those women—they were independent, they saved so many babies like me, so many girls who'd lost their jobs—and they had no reason to think you wanted me more than any of the other men from the Folly did.”

“I still—miss your mother. They did—almost force me into the marriage, but I cared for her. You know I stayed by her, every day after you were born—when she was—” and he suddenly could not go on. Almost a hundred years since his wife had died, and the whole deception began. His hand came up to cover his eyes, hiding their prickling. His other hand was taken by a soft grip, smooth as satin, warm. She had loose thready veins and old-age spots. She pulled him closer and he smelled cinnamon and vanilla. Not vestigia, just the coffee she'd been drinking.

“Shh. You're here now. I thought you were dead a long time ago. At least you're here now.” He could tell when she began to cry too, and he bent over her. He kissed the top of her head—she had just as much hair on it as the last time he'd kissed her. He scooted his chair closer, pressing his forehead against hers, feeling the slackness of the wrinkled skin. Then he let go of her hand and reached all the way around, careful of the spine with its arthritis, and embraced her. 

“Hush, Catherine. Hush.” He rocked his daughter in his arms.


End file.
